using OR and NOT in solr query

Question

I m working on a solr query similar to the following     myField superneat AND myOtherField somethingElse  OR NOT myField superneat    When running this  no results are returned   Using criteria on either side of the OR NOT returns results that I d expect - they are just not working well together   In the case that myField matches superneat  I m intending to also ensure that myOtherField is set to somethingElse  but if myField is not superneat  include it in the results   Can someone explain why solr is not returning results for this kind of query   Should the query be restructured somehow - or is there a different way in which solr can be used to achieve the desired result

User · Answer

Putting together comments from a couple different answers here, in the Solr docs and on the other SO question, I found that the following syntax produces the correct result for my use case

(my_field=my_value or my_field is null):

(my_field:"my_value" OR (*:* NOT my_field:*))

This works for solr 4.1.0. This is slightly different than the use case in the OP; but, I thought that others would find it useful.

User · Answer

Solr currently checks for a  pure negative  query and inserts      which matches all documents  so that it works correctly   -foo is transformed by solr into      -foo   The big caveat is that Solr only checks to see if the top level query is a pure negative query  So this means that a query like bar OR  -foo  is not changed since the pure negative query is in a sub-clause of the top level query   You need to transform this query yourself into bar OR      -foo   You may check the solr query explanation to verify the query transformation    q -title foo amp debug query   is transformed to     -title foo  MatchAllDocsQuery

User · Answer

Instead of  NOT  condition   use       NOT  condition

User · Answer

Just to add another unexpected case  here is query that wasn t returning expected results       AND     field a foo AND field b bar   OR  field b bar     field b in my case is something I perform faceting on  and needed to target the query term  foo  only on that type  bar   I had to insert another     after the or condition to get this to work  like so       AND     field a foo AND field b bar   OR       AND  field b bar       edit  this is in solr 6 6 3

User · Answer

You can find the follow up to the solr-user group on   solr user mailling list  The prevailing thought is that the NOT operator may only be used to remove results from a query - not just exclude things out of the entire dataset    I happen to like the syntax you suggested mausch - thanks

User · Answer

I don t know why that doesn t work  but this one is logically equivalent and it does work   - myField superneat AND -myOtherField somethingElse    Maybe it has something to do with defining the same field twice in the query     Try asking in the solr-user group  then post back here the final answer

User · Answer

simple do  id   12345   OR id   7890         and so on

[search] using OR and NOT in solr query

Examples related to search

Examples related to lucene

Examples related to solr